During network communications between a client and a server, some compression aware browsers are provided with compressed data, such as compressed HyperText Markup Language (HTML) data. However some browsers have problems handling some content in compressed form. For example, the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser is designed to handle compressed rich text formatted content or compressed Microsoft PowerPoint content while other browsers are not. In one case, some versions of the browser plugin Macromedia FlashPlayer not handle compressed plain text. In another case, some versions of the Netscape browser do not handle compressed java script. In another example, some browsers do not handle compressed KHTML, which is the HTML produced from the open source KHTML engine. In yet another example, some browsers do not handle compressed cascading style sheets (CSS), such as Netscape version 4.0.
One way to solve compression issues with a browser is to not compress content for certain types of browsers. However, this has the undesirable effect of not obtaining the benefits of compression, such as to accelerate communications between a client and a server or to improve the response time to a user. By foregoing compressing of content transmitted to the browser, the opportunity to accelerate communications by compressing large content is missed. The uncompressed large content may slow down network communications or impact the user's experience in viewing or interacting with the content.
It would, therefore, be desirable to provide systems and methods to transmit compressed content between a client and a server in a manner agnostic to the compression capabilities of the browser.